Jon Cruddas said Labour MPs should feel obliged to ‘try and make the best of what we have over the next few months and years’ if Corbyn wins.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The author of Labour’s 2015 general election manifesto, Jon Cruddas, has said a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party would risk turning into an early 80s, Trotskyist tribute act.

The MP for Dagenham and Rainham, who served as Labour’s policy coordinator from 2012 until May’s election, was speaking as voting closes to elect the party’s 25th leader, after three months of frantic campaigning.

Corbyn – whose odds on winning were 100-1 at the start of the contest – is now the clear favourite, though the campaigns of rival candidates Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham claim they still have a chance of beating him. Liz Kendall is expected to come fourth.

Cruddas told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’m worried that [a Corbyn-led Labour party] might turn into an early 80s tribute act, a Trotskyist tribute act, which has a culture around it which is very hostile to anybody who disagrees. And it could just collapse in front of the electorate, but I don’t think there’s any safe ground for Labour anyway, so this is one strategy. It might not work. We’ll see.”

Cruddas, who entered parliament in 2001, said Labour MPs should feel obliged to “try and make the best of what we have over the next few months and years” if Corbyn wins.

He argued that the success of Corbyn’s campaign had been symptomatic of deeper problems in the Labour movement. “Here’s the thing with Jeremy Corbyn, he’s not causing the crisis for the Labour party,” Cruddas said. “His campaign is symptomatic of the nature of the crisis. He is inhabiting that crisis and diagnosing it and I think that needs to be welcomed.”

The nature of the Labour membership was at odds with the nature of the society it wants to govern, said Cruddas. “At some stage we’re going to have to pivot out of this leadership election and confront the realities of the country, which could be quite a salutary experience for us.”

Labour needed to address “deeper long-term changes in the industrial structure of the country, technological changes, moves towards individual preferences and choice in consumption of public services”, he said. “All of these things which are at odds with the traditional architecture of the social democracy we’re associated to.”

Cruddas said the party needed to rehabilitate Tony Blair’s legacy, which went beyond “simple caricature”. “[New Labour] was a rich, textured, political project that had real grip in the country and and that’s part of the crisis that is consuming us now because somehow he has been become some sort of figure to be demonised,” he said.

In August, an independent review of Labour’s election defeat, conducted by Cruddas, concluded that the Conservative austerity message had been popular with voters. “The unpalatable truth for the left is that the Tories did not win despite austerity, but because of it.”